Archive for month: September, 2012

“One of these days, everyone is going to figure out that I am a fraud.”

Well, have you? Good! I know I have. Take a moment and pat yourself on the back. Emotional honesty is worth some self-kudos.

Good? “You’ve got be kidding,” you might be thinking, “That’s not good. That’s messed up. And it makes me crazy.”

Yup. It is messed up. I know a lot of smart people like you that have had exactly the same thought. Some might attribute their success to luck. Others to someone’s help or an accident. There’s a name for it – it’s called the Imposter Syndrome. The Syndrome (not really a syndrome by the way, but a great name) is experienced by many people, especially high-performing people. Psychologists have studied it. Books have been written about it. It’s a real phenomenon.

Sometimes the Syndrome is a great friend. It drives you towards excellence, keeps you on your toes, pushes you forward. You might seek more education, read more books, attend more conferences. Good, right?

Here’s the thing. The Imposter Syndrome is also holding you back. It’s a nasty little voice. And it lies.

You know what you know, you have achieved what you have achieved, and, with the hard work you already do, you will continue to grow. You’ll be fine.

But you want to be more than fine. You dream big, have big ideas.

Imagine this for a second. What would it be like if you weren’t driven by a fear of being found out? What if you acknowledged that fear, and then stepped right over it. What would be possible on the other side?

That’s called courage, and I know you have it in you.

The Imposter Syndrome stands between you and innovation

First, go watch this video right now. It will take you 5 minutes and 55 seconds and you will be glad you did.

Twisted, right? The Imposter Syndrome actually stomps all over your ability to create amazing, innovative things. Imagine what that nasty Imposter voice is saying to the people on your team, too? What does that mean for your team’s ability to innovate? Yikes.

Repeat this mantra ten times

Innovation requires failure.

Failure requires risk.

Risk requires courage.

Courage is knowing fear and moving forward anyway.

What’s to be done?

We’ve named the voice. We’ve talked about how it stands between you and innovation. How can you really cultivate courage to overcome the voice and dig deep creatively?

My favorite way to gain courage? Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance is the notion that whatever is happening now just is – it’s not good or bad, it just is. When we accept ourselves just as we are, both the light and the dark, we become more content, more relaxed, and more powerful. We captain our ship – our ship doesn’t captain us.

Now you

Here’s something really simple you can do to build courage and take on this voice.

First, take Dr. Pauline Rose Clance’s Imposter Test and discover how big this voice is for you.

Second, notice the voice when it happens.

Today, notice when this voice makes an appearance. Don’t try to scare it off or shut it down. Be curious. Invite it in. Sit down and have a conversation.

Third, talk to the voice.

Remember – it is not literally telling you that you are a fraud. You aren’t. Not even close. There’s another message there.

Ask the voice, “What are you trying to tell me, [name of voice here – I call mine Saboteur]? What do you want for me?” (Examples: You running up against something challenging and I want you to be safe.)

Fourth, thank the voice and tuck it away.

Now that you’ve noticed the voice, invited it in, and gotten curious about, thank it and send it gently away. It will probably be back, but, hey! Now it’s an old friend.

From here, now that you’ve named and talked to that voice, what’s possible? Is there a project that seems more doable? A relationship you want to strengthen? Could you apply this to your team? Do you have space for new ideas?

Last Thursday, my nephews and niece started at a new school. It’s been a long summer and I can hear my sister breathe a sigh of relief from clear across the country.

Back-to-school is the real New Year. Think about it. Companies start new projects, slow projects suddenly speed up, people get new jobs or renew their commitment to their current job. Instead of making doomed resolutions, you sharpen your pencils, gather your supplies and dig in. The party’s over and now it’s time to work.

Back-to-school can feel melancholy, but this relationship and creativity nerd sees an upside. This is the time of year when relationships, especially for kids, get a whole new energetic push. Back-to-school means re-connecting with your old friends. Back-to-school means new friendships. Allegiances change, friends grow apart or come back together.

With change in the air, you, my perceptive Creative Leader, can use this seasonal cycle to grow your relationship wisdom. Why not take some time today to examine the professional relationships around you. Who’s new? Who’s been around for awhile? Who has drifted away? And who are you unbelievably excited to start working with?

A diagrammatic trip down memory lane

When I first dreamed up this topic, I was feeling nostalgic for the first day of school. (I grew up in an idyllic, diverse small town, and went from nursery school to 10th grade with basically the same 80 people.) As I mentally stepped through the grades, I diagrammed the relationships.

And then I analyzed. I noticed a couple of things.

First, I saw the literal relationships. I was friends with this person, then that person, then this group, etc.

Second, I noticed that each combination had a distinctly different energy to it. With the boys (yes, I was a huge tomboy), we ran around creating adventures, liberating prisoners, storming castles, and just running. With the girls, we spent hours making movies, discussing books, and writing plays. Later, with mostly that same group of girls, hormones re-focused our energy outward on social engagement (boys, cruising, trouble). Along the way, I noticed, I always had a special partnership – someone with whom I was really close and trusted completely.

Third, I noticed my role in each relationship changed. Sometimes I lead, sometimes I followed, sometimes I felt in them and other times on the outside. Sometimes we walked along hand-in-hand or giggled like a gaggle of geese down Main Street. (And yes people, I literally mean Main Street.)

Activity time! Grab some paper and a pen.

Yay! It’s time to diagram your own schoolyard history. Grab some paper and a sharpie and start mapping it out. It doesn’t really matter how you do it – follow your intuition. You can go crazy if you want, pilfering from old school yearbooks or just use stick figures. Glue, yarn, Illustrator. Doesn’t matter.

Once you have your history mapped out, go back through each group and ask yourself:

what was the energy of this group like? what did it feel like to be part of the group?

how did you feel when you were with this group of people? did that feeling change over time?

Now, admittedly, memory isn’t always accurate, but I am pretty sure that if you close your eyes and put yourself back in that classroom, or on that playground, or in that car filled up with menthol cigarette smoke (just kidding, mom!), you’ll bring back some of these feelings. The feelings will be close enough for jazz, as they say.

Why this matters

“Yeah, ok,” you might be thinking, “That was fun, I guess. But how does this help me?”

As Creative Leaders, we need to be highly skilled in emotional intelligence and social intelligence. But, we also need to be skilled in a third intelligence that you may not be as familiar with, called Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI). With RSI, you look not only at how individuals interact, but you understand that there is another force at play in any relationship. That force, the Relationship System, is more powerful than the sum of its parts, and it influences group members as much, or more, than any individual.

1+1≠2.

1+1=3.

There are a variety of tools, like this one, that I use to help my clients develop their RSI so they can more effectively set their teams up to succeed. By visualizing the relationship system, they gain greater awareness of the dynamics at work, which in turn makes them wiser and better able to shepherd their team through uncertainty.

Now you! Do it!

Can you take the exercise we did today and apply it to your workplace? What would happen if you mapped workplace relationships over time? And what would the revealing of those patterns teach you about who your team is and where it is going?